Oregon Dialogue; News Report by Peter Heller on Abortion

[Host] One reason why so many women are thwarted in their attempts to obtain legal abortion is the Hospital Abortion Committee. There is one at each hospital, and its job is to review a woman's case and pass judgment as to whether or not you will be allowed an abortion. A variety of medical people sit on the abortion committees, but often they are the wrong people. Dr. Rosen. [Rosen] In one place, I've seen a hematologist on it, another pediatrician, and another a bacteriologist and so forth. It's not composed of people, or necessarily of people, who are concerned with the immediate patient. [Host] In addition, very few, if any, women sit on the committees, and despite the Catholic belief on abortion, many non-Catholic hospitals allow Catholics on their committees. Why this is allowed, despite the fact that Catholics believe that the natural death of the mother and child is better than the destruction of the fetus is not explained. When asked in the Oberlater survey what the cause of curtailment of abortions was, 70% of the obstetricians on abortion committees who replied said it was Roman Catholic and

other religious pressure. This was dramatically illustrated in Phoenix in 1962 in the Sherri Finkbine case. Mrs. Finkbine's request for an abortion was approved by the Hospital Committee after it was learned she had taken Thalidomide, a drug which caused birth defects in babies. But when the case became publicized, the committee backed down on its decision because of criticism coming from irresponsible people and religious fanatics all over the country. Abortion committees, without almost any exceptions, are strict. John Lasso of the Episcopal Diocese offers an explanation. [Lasso] Now, part of this is a fear that they might become - they being one particular hospital - might become known as an abortion mill, and so most hospitals, although they won't admit this publicly, they have quotas, monthly quotas, and a woman could go before the board with a really legitimate case for a legal abortion and be denied it because they have already exceeded their quota for the month. [Host] A major fault of present abortion laws is that they discriminate against the poor.

John Lasso, director of the Episcopal Church's Department of Christian Social Relations in New York, works with many poor people. [Lasso] It's pretty clear that the present abortion law operates against the poor. It's very difficult for them to get a legal abortion in a hospital. The word is out. These people know that they're not likely to get a legal abortion, and therefore I think that they will attempt much more quickly to get an illegal abortion or to perform a self-abortion. And the results are very often tragic. In 1964 alone, 10,000 women, most of them, Negroes and Puerto Ricans, were admitted to New York City hospitals with complications arising from an illegal abortion or an attempt at an illegal abortion. [Host] Whereas legal hospital abortions in the United States cost only $100 or $200, competent illegal abortions cost as much as $1,000 or $2,000. Because the poor cannot afford this, they must resort to the amateur abortionist, or even less sophisticated means of inducing abortion: umbrella ribs, plastic tubes, injections of

detergent. Not only can upper and middle-class women afford the better illegal abortions, but they can afford the private hospitals and better doctors with more influence to obtain legal abortions for their patients. In New York City, the poor are the Negroes and Puerto Ricans. They make up about 22% of the city's population, but account for only about 7% of the legal abortions in the city each year, while white women account for over 90% of the hospital abortions. Ten times as many private patients are granted abortions as are ward patients. And according to Dr. William Over of New York's ?Knickerbocker? Hospital and a consultant to the Margaret Sanger Research Bureau, the non-white death rate from criminal abortion is ten times higher than the white. One of the most courageous fighters for abortion reform is William Baird, director of the Parents Aid Society in Hempstead, New York. Mr. Baird operates a clinic in Hempstead, where he dispenses birth control devices and abortion information in open defiance of the law.

He does this free of charge. In addition, he operates a mobile van as a traveling clinic in New York's ghetto areas. He has been arrested numerous times for his defiance, and is militantly outspoken and critical of organizations seeking to change abortion laws by evolution. Baird gives his reasons. [Baird] To hear people talk about these problems of abortion, while right this moment, there are literally thousands of people that are dying because of self-induced abortions. And the so-called mental catharsis is a disgrace to the public. These people are the guardians, supposedly, are the vanguard of what goes on, and this whole abortion movement should be stripped of this. I think it's tragic that I - and I alone, perhaps - each night see between 50 and 100 patients that I take my freedom with every one of these patients, send them to licensed physicians, do this publicly, do this openly. These people still talk about placating, about talking, about appeasement, and as I who go into these ghetto areas, I see the suffering that goes on.

I have a letter on my desk now that there are people that are flying are from South Carolina to see me, where they were exposed to the mumps, and they had been advised to get an abortion. No one will help them. And the fact is that when an organization gets as big as Planned Parenthood, tragically, it lives for itself, lives for its own protection, its own guaranteed incomes, and not for the good of the people. This is why I'm angry. They have forgotten the great leader that Margaret Sanger was, that she believed in picketing, believed in fighting. [Host] Now, let's get into the ghetto. What happens in the ghetto in terms of people, not in terms of statistics? [Baird] What happens is it's tragic when I see these people, and I tell them, "Look, I can't help you. I can refer you to an abortionist, but they're going to charge you several hundred dollars." So, what do they do? They resort to the wirecoat hangers, to the knitting needles, to the plastic tubes, and they are the ones that become the 80% of the figures of the many women that die across this nation. [Host] Monsignor William ?McManus? of New York's Catholic Archdiocese offers further explanation

for his stand against abortion. [McManus] The ancients, many times, resorted to infanticide. When civilizations, or families in these civilizations, felt that they could not support the children, they would leave these children on the hillside to die. Now, are we saying in the 20th century, with the tremendous progress that we've made over the centuries, and the tremendous enlightenment that we have achieved, or think we have achieved, the solution to our problems is to kill our fetuses? I have more respect and hope for the human race than that. [Host] Dr. Harold Rosen of Johns Hopkins in Baltimore questions the Monsignor's contention. Almost invariably, someone twists the definition of abortion - and this is a vicious twist so far as I'm concerned - to mean not abortion, but infanticide. It's twisted to mean the killing of the conceptus, what we use a technical word, after the

conceptus is able to live an independent existence of its own outside the mother's body. Now before I became a physician, I was a linguist. I was a philologist. I can state as a fact that in at least 64 languages that I have investigated, no definition of abortion, no use of the word abortion, includes death to the organism after it is able to live by itself. Whenever you hear anyone equate abortion with infanticide and twist the definition to mean that you are recommending that a particular conceptus be killed after it's able to live by itself, then you know that that individual is dishonest. And you'll find that there's conscious dishonesty of this kind very often. [Host] As a last resort, abortion is a highly effective means of population control when necessary to prevent widespread famine or disease.

This was dramatically demonstrated in Japan. When all else had failed, the government of the highly overpopulated island country instituted a public policy of birth control and abortion on demand. Cost: about $2. The results were startling. Japan cut its birth rate in half, from 34 births per thousand population in 1947 to 17 per thousand in 1961. As a result, Japan is highly prosperous and does not suffer from many of the problems besetting its Asian neighbors. Incidentally, the Shinto and Buddhist religions did not interfere with the Japanese government's policy, since they recognize abortion as being a social, rather than a religious, matter. Monsignor McManus comments: [McManus] The population explosion problem is a serious one that has to be studied carefully, and solutions have to be found. I am personally convinced that abortion is not the solution to the population problem. Rabbi Israel ?Margolis? answers:

[Margolis] No, I certainly do not suggest that we should employ abortion as a means of keeping the population down. This is an extremely radical and grotesque distortion of the position that we're taking. It's nothing of the kind. We simply feel that the whole subject of abortion is part of the general picture of birth control. This is the most radical approach that a mother will take, where she simply does not want to bring another child into the world. In the most impoverished areas of the world, the help we are now extending to raise the standards of living is more than offset by the incredible rise in the number of mouths that have to be fed. At a time such as this, when all thinking citizens recognize that human reproduction must be checked if the earth is to be kept safe for humanity, and that it must be done voluntarily, or it certainly will be done by famine, revolution and war, at such a time we are confronted right here in our own country with the ironic spectacle of a continuing battle against the legalization of abortion and an enlightened program of public education and aid in the use of contraceptive methods, whose sole purpose is to reduce illegitimacy and

the tragedy of rejected children, and all of this in the name of religion and morality. I think that it's all too easy to dismiss the entire subject of legalized abortion, as so many holier-than-thou religious leaders do, under the ominous heading of sin. I believe that such a spineless and irrational subservience to the dogmatism of theologians, who of course can speculate with a very fine detachment upon such matters in their cloistered ivory towers, is unbecoming the rational and largely moral society of a great nation. In truth, the civilized mind would be hard put to devise a greater sin than to condemn a helpless infant to the twilight world of the slum or the orphanage, which is where most of the unwanted and illegitimate children end up, or to sentence two parents to a life term of caring for, and yes, even loving and unwelcome child. If there is to be any talk of sin then, by heaven, here I think is where it may be found. Obstetrician Jules Rifkind offers his solution to the population explosion. [Rifkind] I would suggest that the primary answer is more effective birth control. I would totally agree that it is the couple's prerogative to decide whether or not an

active intercourse will result in conception. My only quarrel is with the performance of an abortion rather than the use of birth control. [Host] But in the meantime, the earth continues to increase by 14,000 people each hour, 120 million each year. The Malthusian theory is proving astonishingly accurate: one billion people in 1830, two billion in 1930, over three billion people today, half of them underfed, with four billion due in 1975, and the fifth billion not long after in 1985. Let's turn now to the legal aspects of current abortion laws. Perhaps the most famous of all court cases involving abortion took place in England in 1939. Dr. Alec Byrne, a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons and an eminent London physician using his best judgment, aborted a 14-year-old girl who had been raped by two soldiers.

Dr. Byrne did this operation openly, with the hope of challenging England's abortion law. The case came to trial, and the jury found the doctor innocent, supporting his contention that the pregnancy would have been psychologically harmful to the girl. The decision read, in part, "If a doctor using his best judgment comes to the opinion that the continuance of the pregnancy will endanger the life of the mother or make her a physical or mental wreck, he is not only entitled, but it is his duty to perform the operation, and the operation will not be unlawful." In the United States, a number of court decisions have stated that the danger to life need not be imminent in order for an abortion to be justified, and a number of other cases have upheld the right of a doctor to perform abortions, and almost no jurisdiction in America requires the registration of a fetal death before five months, which seems to show that a fetus is indeed not recognized as a human by the law.

But as most state laws on abortion now stand, it is illegal to prescribe, supply, administer, or advise any woman, pregnant or not, with any substance, medicine, drug, or information which could lead to abortion. In addition, any woman who deliberately causes her own miscarriage is equally guilty of abortion. American Civil Liberties Union attorney Harriet Pilpel, who serves as legal counsel to the Association for the Study of Abortion in New York, explains why current abortion laws are unconstitutional. [Pilpel] They prevent physicians from practicing their professions as they should, and it may even in a sense force them to commit malpractice. I think that in and of itself is an unconstitutional thing for a statute to do. The laws also interfere with the right of privacy, where the implication is very strong that it's up to a married couple to decide whether they want to have children, and the state has no right to say to them, "You must have this child simply because your contraceptive hasn't worked," for example.

A third reason: we have in our Constitution, as you know, a guarantee of equal protection of the laws. These laws do not act with equal force on the rich and the poor. They do not act with equal force on the Negro and the White and the Puerto Rican. I also think the statutes are unconstitutional because we have a general test that a statute must bear some reasonable relation to a proper legislative purpose. I don't know what the proper legislative purpose is in forcing the birth of fatally defective offspring or children who are not wanted to people who don't want them. With reference to those aspects of the abortion law, which say that you may not talk about, refer to abortionists without somehow being an aider or abetter to the crime, I think the very strong argument could be made that that violates the First Amendment, the freedom of speech. [Host] In addition, present abortion laws violate the First and Fourteenth Amendments of the Constitution in that they establish a religion by enforcing a religious morality.

The main proposal for reform comes from the American Law Institute. In 1962, after ten years of study and discussion by judges, professors, lawyers, and other legal experts, the Institute issued its model penal code to serve as a guideline for future legislation in all areas of penal law. Regarding abortion, the code proposed that abortion be considered legal, where the pregnancy would impair the physical or mental health of the woman, where the child might be born with a grave physical or mental defect, or when the pregnancy resulted from rape, incest, or in a girl under the age of 16 who was not married. So far only two states, North Carolina and Colorado, have passed laws based on this code, but similar bills are being considered in many other state legislatures. Mrs. X, the mother of two children who has had several abortions, gives her view of Catholic doctrine. [Mrs. X] The basic premise of their position is simply not the basic premise of the position that most of the United States of America holds.

There are great numbers of Catholic women having abortions, and the statistics in Catholic countries is worse than it is in the United States. There are 20,000 French women a year who die having illegal abortions, which is a fantastic number. Simply fantastic. Now this is a Catholic country, and I don't understand how the church can ignore the proof of the pudding in the countries which they theoretically do control the souls of the citizens. [Host] Statistics would seem to back her up. A survey of Catholic opinion in a March 1967 issue of Newsweek indicates that well over 40% of American Catholics do not support the church's stand on abortion. A number of studies show that Catholics, who make up 25% of the American population, account for about 22% of all abortions, a percentage almost equal to their population ratio. And in France, a Catholic country, the annual number of abortions equals the annual number

of live births according to Dr. Mary Calderon. Episcopal reverend Malcolm Boyd offers some insight on the Catholic position. [Boyd] You mean the church's official position? Because this is true of all denominations now. You can go to any hierarchical figure, and increasingly, what they may say on a number of subjects will be quite different in practice from what the rank and file believe and probably are practicing. I was going to say a hierarchical position on birth control would not be revealing of the fact that as many Catholic as Protestant women are using methods of birth control. And I think it's important to say this because, well, I think the day of the hierarchical statement may be over, really, unless there's some reality in it. Because I think if it's just reflecting an official point of view, but if it is not supported in practice by great many people, well, then what is it? It's a view held by a few people, but it shouldn't pose any longer as more

than that? Dr. Rifkin gives his feelings on the women who have abortions. [Rifkin] My feeling would be that they certainly, in most instances, are not acting in their own best interests. Studies are beginning to appear which show that the act of abortion carries with it a psychological and perhaps psychiatric impact on the woman. Certainly insofar as it is not accepted as a group ethic that the woman can be aborted for socioeconomic reasons, I would suggest that in many cases it does carry a heavy burden of guilt with it. [Host] But Mrs. X makes another point. [Mrs. X] The psychiatric problems involved in getting an abortion are nowhere near to be compared to the psychiatric problems involved in having a baby that you have to give away, or that you have to raise as an illegitimate child.

[Host] And a study by Dr. Hans Binder of Switzerland showed that 33% of girls forced to bear children against their wills were psychologically disturbed - some seriously - by the experience. Reverend Malcolm Boyd sums up the faults of abortion laws. [Boyd] I think anything which forces us into bootlegging, which forces us underground, is quite dangerous. And what seems so terrible here is in the name of preserving human life there is the destruction of human life, because there seems to be a kind of legalistic position about the preservation of the life of the child. And yet, the wife and mother has a relationship with her husband, which I think cannot be despised, with other children. I think anything that sets up a double standard, anything that forces people to get into situations

where they're going to have to pay under the counter, or there is this terrible physical danger involved, there's this psychological danger, there's the awful scar that could be there of having had to do something in this sacrosanct, hidden way. I just think it's a terrible blight on the society. It seems a pity that we can't yet seemingly get it out into the open and deal with it. I think that's most unfortunate. Monsignor McManus reminds us of something else. [McManus] I hope it doesn't sound too simplistic, but each one of us at one time was a fetus. And we're here today because of the love and the care of our mothers and our fathers. You and I at one time were as small and as insignificant, yet with this tremendous potential to be a human being, which every fetus has.

[Host] ?Rider-Lawrence? later gives his final opinion. [Lawrence] The medical profession alone should make all the decisions on abortion and nobody else has a right to get into this decision. It's extremely essential that medical groups stand up, state their minds, say exactly what they feel, and that they continue not just to do the abortions that they're doing now, but continue to enlarge the scope of abortion, because only they, when it comes down to it, can really decide when an abortion is going to be done and which one is going to be done. [Host] And John Lasso of the Episcopal Diocese gives what is probably the best solution. [Lasso] I think that in the interest of logic and consistency I would have to say that there should be no laws on the books governing abortion. Abortion is a social problem, and if we want the doctors to make the decision in certain cases that essentially it is a medical decision to be made, well first of all, of course, by the mother, and then secondly by the doctor attending her. [Host] What conclusions can be drawn?

Reform will do little good, since the laws still will not cover the majority of women presently having abortions. The contention that abortion on demand will lead to promiscuity is a false one, since more than 80% of all abortions are performed on married women who already have children. The unmarried, pregnant teenage girl makes up only a minute percentage of abortion cases. The fact remains that present abortion laws are based on nothing more than a religious minority opinion, forcing doctors to practice dark age medicine. Catholics as individuals certainly have as much right as any other citizen in helping to shape and regulate our laws. However, the fact is that the Roman Catholic Church, acting as an organized lobby, has a consistent record of attempting to influence legislation to conform to its own tenets and beliefs. Would the church approve of Jews attempting to outlaw pork, or Jehovah's Witnesses attempting to make blood transfusions illegal to conform to their particular beliefs? Abortion rules were made by men, celibates in the church, and male legislators elected

by men before women could vote. It is time women were granted full equality and allowed to make personal decisions about their own lives and bodies without state or church interference. Mothers, fathers, all people must, as the Ecumenical Council reaffirmed, be left free to practice the dictates of their own conscience. But even as we wait for this basic right to be granted, women at this very moment continue to die. This is Peter Heller. [silence]